Persistence in PHP with Doctrine ORM

Using Doctrine's Entity Manager

The principle of an ORM is to manage data stored in a relational database through an object-oriented API. We learned about its underlying concepts earlier in this chapter.

Each entity class is mapped to the related database table. Properties of the entity class are mapped to the table's columns.

So, the rows of a database table are represented in the PHP app by a collection of entities.

Doctrine ORM is able to retrieve data from the database and to populate entities with them. This process is called hydration.

Note

Instead of entities, Doctrine can populate PHP arrays in different manners (with the object graph, with a rectangular result set, and so on). It is also possible to create custom hydrators by referring to ...